by Diane Duane
"Well. ." Gabriel said. For his own part, neutrality was all very well, but he was uncertain how it would hold if a party wanted by the Concord was suddenly to turn up inside the place. "If we wanted to pick up or drop data there, I don't think there'd be any trouble with that. Actually piggybacking Sunshine onto the thing concerns me. I wouldn't like to test the facility's neutrality too rigorously."
"And have it fail, you mean," Enda said. "You also mean that there are marines there, a permanent contingent."
She said nothing more, only wandered back toward crew quarters. A few moments later she came out again with the squeeze bottle she used for her plant.
Gabriel watched her water the small brown bulb, of which maybe a couple of centimeters stuck up from the surrounding gravel. "Is there something that plant needs that it might be missing?" he asked after a moment.
Enda glanced up. "As regards its nourishment or its normal growth cycle? Not at all. It is behaving perfectly normally."
"How long is it supposed to stay like that?"
"As long as it likes," said Enda. "Rather like you."
Gabriel put his eyebrows up in a way that was meant to look ironic.
Enda turned to go down to her quarters with the bottle again. "I understand that you might find it uncomfortable to be within range," she said from down the hall. "You would have to decide whether the discomfort would be so unbearable as to put aside a useful business opportunity. As for dropping data at Lighthouse, the 'physical ingress' rules would matter only if we had no right of egress to begin with. As infotraders, we have such a right."
She came back up the hall again and folded down her seat by the Grid access panel. "As for hitching a ride, that depends on whether we pass the usual security check when we apply for space. It also depends on where Lighthouse would be going after we visited her. Her schedule varies without warning and is much affected by local conditions and the political requirements of the moment. Myself, I would not disdain a fifty light-year hitch in a useful direction, but we would need more recent information on where she is headed next."
Gabriel nodded. There was no question but that the Lighthouse could be useful. One long starfall instead of many small ones…
"If you were serious about exploratory work," Enda said, "the Concord Survey Services are located aboard Lighthouse."
Gabriel shook his head. "Again, I'm not sure I want to just walk in there."
Enda shrugged. "It is not a decision that needs to be made now. We should deal with Aegis first." She glanced up the hallway into the cockpit. "We now have only a little over a day until we make starrise and recharge our drives for Mikoa. While doing that, we will want to discuss this with Helm and Doctor Sota, but first things first. When did you last eat anything?" "Uh," Gabriel said.
"Precisely 'uh,' " Enda said, getting up. "It is a good thing the starfall/starrise interval is no longer than it is. You become philosophical and would waste away unless you were reminded to take nourishment every now and then."
"You're just trying to get rid of those prepacks you got on Rivendale," Gabriel said, "the ones you've decided you don't like after all." Nonetheless, he got up and followed her down to the galley. The Lighthouse, he thought.
Why not?
Chapter Six
TWO DAYS LATER, Sunshine made starrise in the endless black between Terivine and Mikoa. This jump made Gabriel nervous, for he still hated jumping to a location that didn't have a planet or a star associated with it. Such approximate destinations, defined by agreement rather than by some physical feature, struck him as a perfect place to be ambushed. "Paranoia," Enda said to him cheerfully after he had expressed this to her.
Nonetheless, when they were ready to come out of drivespace again, Gabriel had the fighting field down over him.
"Thirty seconds," Enda said. "Are you set?"
"As set as I'm going to be," Gabriel said, muffled in his darkness with the controls for the plasma cannons in his hands. They waited.
"Five seconds now," Enda said. Gabriel nodded. "Starrise," Enda said.
Gabriel saw it rendered in the field. Light washed into the cockpit, a pale gold, trickling away to one side. "Right," he said, tumbling the ship slowly and looking around him for another starrise, but there was none. "Where's Helm?"
"I do not know," Enda said. "The detectors do not see him anywhere."
"What happened? We dropped into drivespace at the same time. The last time we went into starfall together, we came out together, tight as you please."
"The last time we went into starfall together," said Enda, "Delde Sota had not been doing something unspecified to another ship downLongshot's comm circuits."
She reached into the 3D display, touched one of the indicators, and the whole thing wavered and jumped as if there had been a power surge. Gabriel swallowed, starting to feel twitchy in his gut. It reminded him too clearly of what had happened when the mass cannon had hit them. She couldn't be here, he thought. I shot her butt off. Impossible—
Then his nerves steadied down, though his stomach was still burning him, a surprising discomfort low down on his left side. Gas pain? Cramp?
Who needs this right now? Gabriel thought, squirming.
The display jumped again.
"We have lost the mass detectors," Enda said. "Gabriel, how could that happen?" She started touching other controls inside the display, one after another, and Gabriel watched them go ash-pale and nonfunctional.
Ow. That hurts. The pain was becoming unbearable. After this I'm not going to eat within six hours of a starrise, I don't care how hungry I am.
"I have no idea," Gabriel said, "but how could anything Delde Sota did to that woman's ship have possibly affected Helm's stardrive?"
"I don't know," Enda said. "I would prefer to wait until Delde Sota turns up and ask her myself." No one was there. Gabriel watched his in-field version of the main display flicker, waver, and then pale to nothing.Everything—ship's environmental energy levels, her fuel, all her stardrive readouts — faded and were gone.
Gabriel's stomach was churning. Without instrumentation, the ship not only couldn't fight, she could barely move. That burning was now like a coal, fierce and concentrated. That's not gas. Gas doesn't burn on the outside! What the—
Gabriel hurriedly unfastened his straps and jumped up. The pain slipped down his leg. Not the stomach. My pocket—
He started to reach into it, then hurriedly changed his mind and grabbed the fabric of the pocket so that he could dump the contents on the floor.
The luckstone fell out. It was fiery hot and blazing with light. It bounced to the floor, lay still, and began sizzling itself a little hole into the supposedly indestructible plastic decking. The smooth oval stone, normally dead black, now shone with a greenish-golden-white light. The fierce little glow slowly pulsed bright to pale to bright again.
Enda stole a glance downward, and her eyes widened as Gabriel hurriedly sat back into his chair and began refastening his straps.
"It has never done anything like that before, has it?" Enda asked.
"What, try to burn a hole in me and then succeed in doing the same to my deck?" Gabriel said. "Now that you mention it, no!" He threw the luckstone a very annoyed glance. "What if it keeps on doing this? It's going to burn straight down into the personal cargo hold!"
"It may if it pleases," Enda said, reaching into the display again. "I have other problems. Oh!"
The display lit up again with a sudden flash. Enda scowled as if she didn't trust it. Gabriel busied himself with getting back into the fighting field, which still seemed functional for the moment.
"Everything is back again," Enda said, "and the mass detectors are up and running once more. What a relief."
"I'd be a lot more relieved if we knew where Helm was." "Somewhere else, plainly."
Gabriel gave Enda a look. "Have I mentioned to you that the fraal sense of humor can be a little strange?" "Several times," Enda said. "Similar claims can be made about the human o
ne. That joke about the wire brush, now—"
One of the warning lights, the one that said EMERGENCY, grew to an alarming size in the 3D display and began flashing on and off.
Gabriel looked frantically at all the other indicators, but nothing seemed to be wrong withSunshine. "Enda?"
"It is not our emergency," she said, reaching out to the indicator. "Someone else's." "Helm?"
"No. He is not here, but someone else is."
The display filled with data — not just text, for once, but a schematic. "Small," he said as he studied the data. "A cargo ship?" "Possibly. We have not seen this one before?" "You mean, is this the other little ship that was at Rivendale? No." "That," Enda sighed, "is a relief."
The emergency message now began to play in several different sets of characters, several different sets of colors, and one sound. "This is free ship Lalique, out of Richards, en route from Mantebron to Aegis. We have suffered stardrive failure and are near the Mikoa-Aegis transit point. Transiting vessels, please render assistance, or if passing through on emergency transit, please convey emergency message to nearest drivesat relay. This is free ship Lalique— "
"It's recorded," Gabriel said. "Still, I'm surprised we're the first ones on the scene."
"Assuming we are," Enda said, "and that they have not merely forgotten to turn off the broadcast." She studied the display. "Well, let us go see what we can do for them. This is a bad place to have a stardrive failure."
Gabriel nodded. They might have to take the passengers aboard and leave the ship here, then go for help. Aegis would be the logical place to take them, so Gabriel and Enda's own plans would not suffer much, but he didn't much like the thought of having strangers aboardSunshine. He looked down at the luckstone, which was still glowing in the little socket it had melted for itself in the floor, though it no longer seemed to be working its way any further in. "Have you got a fix on them?" he asked.
"Yes, no problem. They're no more than forty or fifty thousand kilometers away. They were probably using the same arbitrary starfall figures for the system that we were."
Gabriel nodded.Sunshine's system drive kicked in, and the two of them sat there looking outside for any sign of the ship and stealing glances at the floor between them.
"It seems to be quieting down," Enda said. "Are you all right, Gabriel?"
He touched the seam of the top of his shipsuit open and stared down inside, then frowned. "I got scorched. It burned right through the pocket material."
Enda blinked at that. "The material is supposed to be fireproof, I thought."
"Then that wasn't fire," Gabriel said. "I thought the decking was indestructible, too. Can we claim for repairs on the guarantee?"
"You would probably have to explain to them how you did it," Enda said, "and then they might ask you to reproduce the effect. First you will have to work out just why the stone behaved that way."
Gabriel shook his head. "Never mind. I'll just use some hull patching on the hole. It's just a shame. That's the first real scratch or damage thatSunshine has had. She was perfect until now."
"Ah. You mean, except for when the hold came apart and nearly fell off when you landed on Grith that time."
"Oh,that," Gabriel said with a smile.
Enda laughed softly. "Take a look in the field and tell me if that is the ship we're looking for."
Gabriel could see the gravity "dimple" of the vessel, drifting intact. At least the stardrive hadn't caused any structural damage to the vessel.
There was a long pause."Sunshine?" said a woman's voice after a moment. "Oh, what a relief! Thank you so much! There are just two of us. No medical problems, thanks. Can you manage airlock-to-airlock?"
"We have a collapsible tube, yes," Enda said. "I will squirt the tube specs and coordinates to your computer when you're ready." "Ready now."
They closed in slowly and caught their first glimpse of the ship just a kilometer away. Lalique was obviously an old family-style ship. She was big, nearly twice Sunshine's length, and broad in the beam. Two pair of short wings, a little bigger than canards, just out from the cigar-shaped main hull. Four big cargo pods slung high, two and two, sat snug against the hull near the back. "Nice," Gabriel said as they closed in. "Plenty of room in there."
Enda maneuvered Sunshine in close to Lalique until the two vessels were drifting at the same speed and in the same direction. The computer confirmed the match. Enda then triggered the flexible airlock tube so that its counterpart program on the other ship could lock the ships together.
This took several minutes. Gabriel stayed in the fighting field, looking everywhere for Helm. "Where the frikes is he?" Gabriel muttered.
Enda sighed and said, "He has probably popped out further out in the system where the mass detector cannot see him. Let us wait and see what happens."
There came a soft chime from the display. "This is working, at least," Enda said."Lalique, our computer is showing the mating as complete and secure. Are you showing the same?" "Yes, we are. Please come aboard," said the woman's voice.
"Five minutes," said Enda and cut the channel. "Gabriel, I think you can safely come out of that for the moment."
He nodded and collapsed the field, blinking in the normal ship's light. "I'll leave it on automatic announce, though," Gabriel said, unstrapping himself and heading down the hall to the arms and equipment locker. "I want to know when Helm turns up."
Enda nodded as they both paused by the locker to pick up hand comms and a sidearm each. "It's not like I don't trust them," Gabriel said, "but—"
"You don't trust them" said Enda approvingly. "Why should you? At any rate, this far out from anywhere, no one is going to be offended by anyone carrying defensive weaponry."
"Right" he said as he checked the charge and the safety of his pistol. He holstered it at his hip, and then reached down into the bottom of the locker for his roll of general access tools, the ones used to get into panels and under deckplates. The other ship probably had tools of its own that were suited to the fastenings its own hardware used, but Gabriel liked to have his tools with him.
I just hope I don't have to try to do anything really technical, he thought as they made their way through the hold to the airlock. IfLalique's stardrive was anything likeSunshine's, it was covered with alarming labels saying things likeNo user-serviceable parts inside andOpening casing invalidates warranty. Sometimes such warnings were just clever ways of making sure that the drive manufacturer and its licensees were not cheated out of the price of service calls, but sometimes they were genuine indicators that anything you did to the drive might cause you, it, and everything around you to suddenly become collapsed matter. The trouble lay in telling which was which.
They paused by the airlock port, and Enda touched the opening combination into the locking pad. The door hissed open, and the two of them slipped into the tube and pulled themselves along the cables down the orange-walled corridor.
Another hiss of air heralded the opening of the door at the far end. "Come in," said that female voice, sounding more cheery this time.
Gabriel was concentrating on keeping his stomach under control. He had never liked going rapidly back and forth from gravity to non-gravity areas, though it was something every marine learned to handle, if not enjoy. Mostly it involved keeping your cardiac sphincter shut by muscle pressure, and this meant single-minded concentration until you got back to gravity again.
Shortly he saw floor in front of him, or what would be floor in a moment. He braced himself against the cables and put his feet through.
A moment later he was upright and looking around at a kind of entrance hall with several doors and a corridor leading out of it. A hand seized his upper arm, steadying him. "Welcome aboard," said the hand's owner, "I'm Angela Valiz." Gabriel looked up and replied, "Gabriel Connor."
He looked at her closely as he said it, watching for any reaction, but there was no flicker of recognition in her face. She was a tall, strongly-built young woman, maybe Gabriel's age
. Her fair hair tailed down the back of her neck rather the way Enda did her own. She was dressed in the baggy trousers, tunic, and soft boots popular for casual wear in most places of the Aegis system. She looked at him curiously and asked, "Bluefall?" "Uh, yes."
She nodded and said, "I recognized the accent." She turned to Enda, who had come in behind Gabriel. "Respected, welcome."
"Thank you indeed. Enda, they call me." She made a graceful gesture with her left hand, a variant on the human handshake. Most fraal were left-handed, and this gesture showed that the hand was empty of weapons.
"You're very welcome, Enda."
Gabriel looked around him. What he could see ofLalique was handsome-looking. The ship's walls and ceiling panels were soft pastel beiges and blues. High ceilings and broad doorways gave the interior an unusually open and airy look. "Nice place you've got here," Gabriel said.
"Thanks. It's been in the family for the last fifty years, but right now I just want to get it home safe." She looked down the hallway with a concerned expression. "What happened, exactly?" Gabriel said.
"Come on down to the control room," Angela said. "You can look at the drive controls there. We made starrise here five days ago, recharged, and got ready to drop into starfall again, but the drive wouldn't engage. Everything else seems fine. The drive diagnostics report it ready to go, but when you hit the go button. . nothing."
They came into the control room. It was genuinely a room, not just a large cockpit as inSunshine. Several people could crew the bridge at five stations arranged around a small circular array of panels.
The viewport ran three-quarters of the way around the circle above the panel array. "Over here," Angela said and indicated one panel.
Gabriel sat down and studied the control configuration of the keypad for a moment. Fortunately it was one of the configurable control pads that the major manufacturers had been using for the last couple of decades, having finally realized that no one had to relearn the system every time it needed to be checked out.
"Right," Gabriel said, and started working his way down through the diagnostics tree to where the stardrive's inboard routines could be accessed.
